By Tom Kando
On August 18,
2011, Matt Patterson published a vicious
hit piece against President Obama in the Washington Post. It
continues to be widely circulated on the
Internet, often misleading the
readers that it’s the Washington Post which feels this way about Obama. In fact,
the paper only printed this in an
attempt to be fair to “the other side.”
Patterson’s thesis, based on what Norman Podhoretz had
written earlier, is that Obama is an incompetent nincompoop, our first
affirmative
action President, voted into office solely because of his race. The
claim is that Obama may be our worst President ever, and that his election was the result of
misguided liberal white guilt and mass hysteria
among the electorate.
Patterson not only claims that Obama is a disastrously
incompetent President, but that he also failed to achieve anything of value during his earlier academic and
political careers.
My purpose here is hardly to rebut Patterson’s absurd statement, but to playfully suggest a ranking of US Presidents:
As to the hit piece, just this: it is a furious rant, utterly lacking any facts or evidence, and often describing Obama in a manner precisely the opposite of reality: Patterson says that without a Teleprompter the President is speechless, can’t think clearly, is devoid of ideas, speaks in clichés, is narcissistic!
Is Patterson confusing Obama with George W. Bush, or what? Isn’t the opposite obvious - that Obama is a Spock-like man who possesses superior rationality, cool detachment and problem-solving capabilities?
Patterson
accuses Obama of blaming his predecessor for the country’s problems. To the
contrary, the President has so much
class that he does not do this enough, despite inheriting the worst mess in 70
years.
As to the
most obscene accusation - Obama is an affirmative action president:
Patterson and Podhoretz reiterate the oft-heard cliché that affirmative action is racist.
One thing is
a lot clearer: The true racists are
those who cannot conceive of a person of color
achieving something without the help of affirmative action! If a black man reaches a high position, it
must be due to affirmative action, right?
What utter hogwash.
Actually, the
shoe is entirely on the other foot: It is the
George W. Bushes and the Mitt
Romneys of the world who are utterly unqualified, yet are admitted to Yale,
Stanford and Harvard solely because of their family’s blue blood and despite the fact that they
couldn’t have passed my Sociology One class.
Space does
not allow me to list Obama’s achievements, but any semi-informed person
knows that they are considerable, despite inheriting the George W. Bush
disaster and the worst Republican obstructionism in history. While it’s too early to tell, I
predict that Obama will go down as one of our country’s top 10 Presidents.
And now, I
offer you my ranking of our country’s 43
Presidents:
Such rankings
are usually done by “experts” such as
History and Political Science professors, and journalists. My rankings are based on my own very limited knowledge plus rankings by
the eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and articles such as
a Spring 2007 Newsweek cover story. Obviously I had to deal with Obama without the
help of Schlesinger or Newsweek:
Criteria
include such things as the conduct of
war (e.g. Washington, Lincoln, FDR),
major social legislation (e.g. Lyndon Johnson), peace and prosperity (e.g.
Eisenhower), making a mess of things (e.g. George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter).
Bias and
subjectivity are unavoidable. For
example, no one can disagree with Arthur Schlesinger that George Washington
was better than Richard Nixon. But how
bad was Richard Nixon? Apart from
the Watergate scandal, Nixon made
some positive contributions, for example
the opening to China.
In the table
below, Presidents receive a score ranging from 0 to 10, and I then group them
into four categories: the 14 best, the 10
middle, the 10 worst, and 9 whom
I was not able to rank.
Table
I: U.S. Presidents, Grouped and Ranked from Best to Worst
Best Fourteen
|
1
|
Franklin Roosevelt
|
10
|
2
|
Abraham Lincoln
|
10
|
|
3
|
James Madison
|
9
|
|
4
|
Thomas Jefferson
|
9
|
|
5
|
George Washington
|
9
|
|
6
|
Barack Obama
|
8
|
|
7
|
William Clinton
|
8
|
|
8
|
John Adams
|
8
|
|
9
|
James Monroe
|
8
|
|
10
|
Theodore Roosevelt
|
8
|
|
11
|
Harry Truman
|
8
|
|
12
|
John Q. Adams
|
7
|
|
13
|
Dwight Eisenhower
|
7
|
|
14
|
Woodrow Wilson
|
7
|
|
Middle Ten
|
15
|
Andrew Jackson
|
6
|
16
|
John Kennedy
|
6
|
|
17
|
George Walker Bush
|
6
|
|
18
|
Lyndon Johnson
|
6
|
|
19
|
Ronald Reagan
|
6
|
|
20
|
John Tyler
|
5
|
|
21
|
Grover Cleveland
|
5
|
|
22
|
James Carter
|
4
|
|
23
|
Richard Nixon
|
4
|
|
24
|
Gerald Ford
|
4
|
|
Worst Ten
|
25
|
Ulysses Grant
|
3
|
26
|
James Garfield
|
3
|
|
27
|
Calvin Coolidge
|
3
|
|
28
|
Zachary Taylor
|
2
|
|
29
|
Andrew Johnson
|
2
|
|
30
|
Herbert Hoover
|
2
|
|
31
|
Warren Harding
|
1
|
|
32
|
James Buchanan
|
1
|
|
33
|
George W. Bush
|
1
|
|
34
|
William Harrison
|
0
|
|
Don’t know(Nine)
|
35
|
Martin Van Buren
|
|
36
|
James Polk
|
||
37
|
Millard Fillmore
|
||
38
|
Franklin Pierce
|
||
39
|
Rutherford Hayes
|
||
40
|
Chester Arthur
|
||
41
|
Benjamin Harrison
|
||
42
|
William McKinley
|
||
43
|
William Taft
|
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